The Authors’ Circle Presents:
David Denby, author of Eminent Jews
Sunday, November 16th at 3pm
Author David Denby will discuss his book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer with Gerald Howard and Katie Rosman, in person at Tuxedo Park Library and livestreaming via Zoom.
Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life.
They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.
As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.
Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous—larger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.
“With Eminent Jews, David Denby has written a fantastic book about four remarkably talented and consequential figures of American arts and letters. The book is as brilliant and witty as its subjects.”
―Aaron Sorkin
About the Author:
David Denby was born in New York City in 1943, and was educated at Columbia and Stanford. He is the author of Great Books (1996), an acclaimed account of returning to college and reading the Western classics during the curriculum wars; American Sucker (2004), his wrenching memoir of getting caught up in the stock market at the time of the tech bubble and the breakup of his marriage; Snark (2009), a polemic against the spread of nasty low sarcasm as a journalistic style in the Internet age; Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012), a collection of his best movie criticism from The New Yorker; Lit Up (2016), a prequel to Great Books, in which he embeds in tenth-grade English classes at three public schools to see if—and how—teenagers can be turned on to serious reading; and Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (2025), a biography of four American Jews who emerged after the Second World War and triumphed by means of their own gifts and the new media of television, the long-playing record, mass-market paperbacks, and the like. Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer were free in a way that Jews had never been free before. They led creative and tumultuous lives, made trouble for themselves and others, and changed American culture. Denby is a staff writer and former film critic for The New Yorker, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, and New York magazine (where he was film critic from 1978 to 1998), among other places. He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Rieger. He has two sons and two grandsons. Click here to visit his website.
About the Interviewers:
Gerald Howard is recently retired Vice President and Executive Editor from Doubleday Books. He is a recipient of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Lit Hub, n+1, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications.
Katie Rosman is a reporter for the Metro desk at The New York Times, contributing narratives and profiles about people, events and dynamics in New York City and its outer reaches.